Quell
by Oisin55
Summary: The First Quarter Quell forced the districts to vote on who they would sent into the Games. This is who they sent - and why.


**D1F**

She's the only one who actively campaigns for it.

She plasters pictures of herself all over the Street of Gold and the Street of Spices, smiling pretty and pursing her lips and batting her eyes, all the glamor shots they take at the DAEYD so the Capitol can decide which ones they want to purchase.

She had been cut from the DAEYD three months ago. It wasn't supposed to be that way. She was special. Her mother, father, servants, they all told her she was special. The DAEYD told her she wasn't special enough.

_**VOTE FOR ME!**_ the posters scream.

They do.

**D1M**

Even when the paper is being pulled out of the reaping bowl, he doesn't expect it to be him. He's not the prettiest, not the most athletic, he's not particularly charming or gregarious, he's good with knives and competent with a sword but there are plenty of others who are better.

But the Capitol had passed down word that there were to be no volunteers this year. District 1 would feel the full brunt of the Quarter Quell. The message was clear. The strikes and walk-outs and demands for more compensation and worker benefits that have slowed production for the past year will end, or their children will no longer be safe.

The DAEYD recognizes that District 1 will not have a Victor this year. So they go through the student files and select one that they could afford to lose. A tribute who will give a respectable show but will not be any great loss.

Then they quietly spread the word.

**D2F**

"We're allowed to have volunteers," the trainer tells both of them in the Pit. She tries to keep it professional and clipped, but no one can miss the small strain of relief in her voice. The girl gives a small start. It had never occurred to her that they wouldn't be allowed to volunteer. When she sees the look in her mentor's eyes, she's not sure whether she should feel relief or dread.

She gets to see the government file for the girl she's volunteering for before the reaping. There were five frontrunners, the 'winner' chosen by only a slim margin. She's a weedy strip of a thing, malnourished and pockmarked from the pox. She's from one of the outlying towns. Her parents are both drunks. Maybe she's been chosen as punishment for some sin of her Ma and Pa, or maybe she just has the least value to the district. Could be either.

She watches the chosen girl stumble down the stage even as she raises her arms to the cheering crowd in victory. It almost seems cruel, she thinks as she watches the slouching figure out of the corner of her eye. Her replacement will be going only to glorious victory or honorable sacrifice. She'll have to live with the Quell on her shoulders for the rest of her life, every time she walks out of her house to face her neighbors.

**D2M**

He doesn't care what the sniveling fourteen year old did to deserve being on the stage. The sooner he goes into the arena, the sooner he'll come out again. And then he's going to find Virtus Machetti and fuck him over so hard he'll beg for forgiveness before he dies.

**D3F**

She screams when her name is called, she screams loud and long and the Peacekeepers have to drag her up to the stage where she paints the polished wood with her lunch.

It was an accident, don't they understand it was an accident? She had only tried a little bit of the stolen gin, it wasn't even her car, there had been four others and no one had seen the old woman until she was halfway across the street and they came barreling towards her.

Her test scores were flawless, her aptitude assessment was off the charts. The Capitol liaison had covered the incident up, probably because it was his car and his nephew who had taken his friends along for the joyride. But he hadn't been behind the wheel. She finds him in the crowd and he's looking at her with fear and horror.

She hopes they call him up too.

**D3M**

This is because of his brother. He knows it's because of his brother. But Tenzan is nineteen and he's sixteen and he's eligible and Tenzan isn't and that's why they called his name.

He trudges up the stairs to the stage, looking out into the crowd. His friends in the sixteen section are horrified. His family is hysterical. His brother could be carved from ice. They have a small space around them, their neighbors and friends moving cautiously away as if afraid to catch something.

Tenzan comes to him in the Justice Building to say good-bye. He's crying. He tells his baby brother to come back and he'll make it up to him, he'll never do something so stupid again, he's so, so, _so sorry._

He falls thirty-six seconds into the bloodbath, his throat crushed by the huge fist of the boy from 8. It's not enough to kill him, though, and as the synapses in his brain flash and die his body twitches and shudders over six long minutes, just like the three people who died when his brother sold them tainted drugs.

**D4F**

She's only ever stolen just enough to survive. Food, money from fat purses that would never be missed, medicine for her mother from the apothecary if she was quick and daring enough.

But then she stole a line hose from the engine of one of the fishing trawlers and sold it cheap. The owner couldn't afford a new one, not at Capitol prices. He didn't make his quota for a week and he lost the boat.

They don't want to vote her in, but they have families and livelihoods and they have to put bread on the table too. It's nothing personal.

**D4M**

You knock up one girl above your station and they vote you into the Hunger Games. Fuck that.

**D5F**

Everyone knew it wasn't her fault. She had been working 20 hour shifts in the hydroelectric plant because her sisters were growing fast and her parents couldn't afford new shoes. Her supervisor should have known that she didn't have the training, that she was exhausted. She never should have been let near the generators. But they were short-handed and he needed to get those parts put in, so he muttered off some instructions and sent her on her way.

Press the yellow button down and then press green _while_ you're still pressing yellow. That's how you cut the power. But she didn't hear the instructions properly and now two men are dead. Her supervisor took the blame, and accepted the reprimand and the demotion.

If it happened last year or even a couple of months ago, she'd be safe. But the accident happened a week after the announcement. Half the district is familiar with her name now, and many of them decide they'll just pick someone at random.

The rest is just psychology.

**D5M**

He didn't think he'd ever find something he hated more than the Capitol, but then his district voted him into the Hunger Games.

He screamed at them from the stage, tore down a light and hurled it into the panicked crowd, and the cameras flashed and reporters crowded around because it was such good television. The crowd mutters uneasily below him. Stupid sheep. Didn't they realize he'd been trying to help them? The anti-Capitol graffiti, the sabotage, the vandalism, it was all to urge the mindless lowing masses to fight the Capitolist pigs and their fascist agenda. Sure, there were some crackdowns, some raids. Do they think he doesn't know? He was there watching when they flogged those men, trying to get someone to talk, to point fingers.

Well they can all rot in their own self-made prison. He's going to win, they'll see, he'll come back as a Victor and he'll tear down the Capitol from the inside, but he'll burn down the district first.

Fascist swine.

**D6F**

She was born addicted. Her mother was a morphling, she had been taking it all through the pregnancy, and her daughter had been born dependent. There's no such thing as rehab or addiction programs in 6, and especially not for children.

She's thirteen but she looks closer to nine. She's bone thin, with pasty yellow skin and wide bloodshot eyes. She's prone to fits if her mother doesn't share her hit, foaming at the mouth and tearing what's left of her stringy brown hair.

She's the ugliest sacrificial lamb anyone has seen, and no one pretends they're very sorry to see her go. Her mentor gives her a hit of morphling in the Justice Building to keep her quiet for the cameras. Her mother finds her in the library and begs her to share.

**D6M**

He knew. He knew it would be him. He's already halfway up the aisle when his name is called. They're cheering as he goes up. He grins down at them, flashing the gold at his fingers and diamond stickpin in his silk tie. He sees the anger, the hate and the vindictive pleasure at his coming demise and he leans over and spits onto the concrete in front of them.

He's the youngest drug lord in the city, and his agents tell him he's the most feared. His parents tried to reign him in, then beat him down, then escape his wrath. They failed on all counts. The district is his oyster, its citizens are his plaything. Their children are his drug mules, their pitiful wages are his for the taking for their own 'protection.'

They think they've beaten him, but they've forgotten one thing. Someone always comes back. And when he does, he's going to make sure they never forget his name.

**D7F**

Her district still believes in the old gods, because they're brainwashed and would rather believe in a comforting lie than a hard truth. There are no gods, there is no Dark Forest, and the dead are dead and that's all there is to it. At school she's one of the loudest and most vocal in her disbelief, making her few friends and more enemies.

Her father is one of the worst. He makes her wear long sleeves even in the heat of summer so she doesn't entice others into temptation. They have to pray seven times a day, and he'll yell and scream if they fidget or roll their eyes. When she refuses, when she rolls up her sleeves, when she snaps back at him, he'll lock her in the woodshed, sometimes for days. Her mother shuffles around, lifeless and cowed, never lifting her voice in protest, accepting her subordinate role as her husband's helpmeet by the will of the gods.

Well, not her. She pulls back the plank of the woodshed one night and sneaks out, not to scavenge for roots or berries like she usually does, but to bring the fight to her father's gods. She's had enough. She's snapped. Someone has to stand up to the district's oppressive dogma.

The shrine is deep in the woods, a secret place for the devout, a small wooden lean-to filled with statues and icons, candles and slips of prayer-paper tucked in corners and cracks. She stacks tinder against the lean-to, then pulls some flint from her pocket and lights the fire. The whole shrine is a bonfire in less than a minute.

Her openness in her disbelief is her undoing. They all suspect who did it. And they decide that if she doesn't believe in the gods, she should have nothing to fear by going off to meet them.

**D7M**

His mother told him that he was running with a bad crowd. She warned it would come back to burn him. He laughs. They're not a bad crowd, it's his crew, and half of them are his cousins. Sure they raise a little hell, but if you're going to have a shit life, might as well have fun with it. There's nothing to do in this hell-hole besides drink and whore and bet on the unsanctioned brawls and knife throwing matches. So they start a few drunken fights, find a few good girls to corrupt in the sack. It's harmless.

He's not the worst of the lot, not by far, but he's the only one still of reaping age, barely, and when his name comes out of the bowl it's the first time he realizes that his mother was a wise woman.

**D8F**

An hour after they announce the Quell, she walks down the hill from the Clear into Fog Town. She finds a group of her school mates in an alley, kicking around a tin can and smoking cheap grass.

She walks up to one of them, who eyes her uneasily.

"Hit me," she says.

"What?"

"You know who I am. You know what my dad did. I bet you want to. Hit me."

The boy growls. "I'm not going to hit no girl just cause she asked."

One of his friends shuffles over. "I'll hit her."

She nods at him. He pulls his fist back, pauses for a moment as if looking for a trick, and then decks her. She goes down hard.

"Does it always hurt so much?" she asks as she pulls herself to her feet.

The boys nod. "Helps if you move your head with the punch."

"Do it again," she says.

"Why are you doing this?" asks the first boy as she struggles up for the fifth time, the bruises starting to flower across her face. She'll have more on her chest and arm by morning.

"Training," she says. "Now hit me again."

**D8M**

"Just kill him now!" screams a voice from the crowd as he steps onto the stage. A few more voices raise in agreement. Hate rolls off the crowd in waves.

He smiles and sucks in air through the space where his front teeth were. It makes a rattling noise. They've learned to fear that sound, the sweet, pretty things who walk through Fog Town looking for a couple of coins to buy a bit of food. They're not the fun ones though. Those are the ones he picks out and watches before he pounces on his prey. The ones he breaks. The young ones especially. He has a mark tattooed on his massive forearm for each one. Five so far.

He looks down at the girl next to him. She's just the type he'd pick. Beautiful, dark, dressed in fancy machine-made clothes. A Clear girl. He wonders if he'll be able to find a tattoo artist in the Capitol to give him one more mark after the Games.

He shakes her hand, hissing through his teeth, giving her the hard, leering sneer he always does when he looks at prey. He's so caught up in the memory of the girls who cried, flinched, bit their lip in terror that he doesn't notice this particular girl does none of these things.

**D9F**

She was wearing a pretty green dress with a head band in her hair and a smile on her face when she asked him to the Harvest Ball at the school they shared. He said no.

She was wearing the pretty green dress with a head band in her hair and a smile on her face when the Peacekeepers tied him to the whipping post and tore his back open. No one ever says no to her. The tears came easy when she told the lie, her lips quivered just the right amount when she told her daddy about the peasant boy who asked her to the ball and then assaulted her when she turned him down.

No one will ever tell her 'no' again. Her smile grows just a bit more as she listens to him scream.

She's wearing a pretty green dress with a head band in her hair when her name comes out of the reaping ball. But this time, the smile is worn by her classmates.

**D9M**

He hadn't realized just how much his district hated gay people until now.

**D10F**

Her father is a hunter. Deer, mountain cats, wild goats. And other, more intelligent prey.

They call themselves the Anasazi. He calls them vermin. They should be stamped out and exterminated like the treacherous, diseased swine they are. But the Capitol has decided that they still have use for them, so he and his buddies go up into the mountains on their days off, tracking the ones who are so poor and desperate that they'll risk the dangers of the borderlands to grub for a bit of food.

He'll come back from those trips with a goat slung between branches and a new pretty turquoise necklace for his daughter.

They're just animals. Vermin. Prey.

But he forgets until reaping day that the prey can be just as patient as the hunter until they're ready to bare their claws.

**D10M**

They have to pick two. The girl is an easy choice. The boy less so.

They'll pick a Settler. Ten Anasazi kids go into the Games for every Settler, so it's time to even the score a bit, even though there are plenty of troublemakers among their own people who might deserve to go in more. This is their one chance to save their own for a year and they're not going to waste it.

The few Anasazi who work in the Settlements pick out the likely choices and finally they come to an agreement. An eighteen year old. Broad, strong and capable. He's not supporting a family, no disabilities. He might have a chance. They have to send someone in, and the only honorable thing is to choose one who might make it back out.

The final approval comes from their only Victor. She looks at the name and the picture, closes her eyes and gives a heavy nod.

18,315 days pass between the burial and the day the Capitol bombs the markers into rubble. The Victor makes sure that his grave is covered with fresh flowers for all of them.

**D11F**

She volunteers because no one in District 11 is guaranteed a long life, but she can give herself a meaningful death. She has nothing else left.

**D11M**

They hadn't planned it. He had never seen her before she called out to volunteer and replaced the sobbing fifteen year old on the stage. He smiles to himself. It's too perfect.

He almost falters when they call up the boy. It's the son of his own overseer. The scares on his back, the ones he received at nine and the ones he earned last week and all the ones in between twitch. The call goes up for volunteers. He almost doesn't do it. He feels the pleasure fill his chest at the sight of the little boy who so closely resembles his father shivering on the stage.

But that's what they want, isn't it? And if there's one thing he'll never do, it's give the damn Capitol what they want.

So he calls out and volunteers and his district partner looks at him in disbelief, then understanding, then pride, and the emotions are mirrored in the faces of their district, and for the first time in a quarter century the cheers are real.

**D12F**

Her cat follows her up on the stage. She cries because she knows at least something will miss her. None of the Community Home kids come to say goodbye. The matron stops by to hand over her rag doll. It's a district token, she says. As good as any.

When she dies a few hours into the Games, the commenter even gets her name wrong. In the Community home, her bed is already filled by a new girl with a new name. A thin, calico cat winds its way between the straw mattresses, mewling for its master until someone breaks its neck and takes it to the kitchens.

**D12M**

He's a Community Home kid too, but he has friends and a grandmother in the Seam, even though she can't afford to take care of him and his sister. He never finds out why he was chosen. He asks his escort, and she says she doesn't know, but he should be honored that his district chose him for such an important Games.

He talks to himself through the parade and training. He tells himself that he won't forget who he is. He likes squirrel stew. His favorite color is purple. His sister has grey eyes. His grandmother came from District 5. He's the fastest runner in his class.

He's still talking when the gong sounds. "My name is-" he says and then he dies.

He had a name, and a family, and hopes and dreams for a future. He goes into the Capitol records as Hunger Games death #558.

**AN: To find out who wins the First Quarter Quell, check out Chapter 26 of The Victors Project. I hope you enjoyed the piece. Review either way!**


End file.
